Historical Badass Upgrade

"So, all in all, just a normal day in the life of Leonardo da Vinci. Turn lead into gold, paint the most famous portrait of all time, and invent the first hang glider. And I bet it’s not even 9 AM."

—The Agony Booth recap of Hudson Hawk.

Sometimes a Historical Domain Character is portrayed by adding a copious amount of Badassery and Stuff Blowing Up, that was either far lesser or non-existent with the Real Life person. The reasons could range from Did Not Do the Research or Rule of Cool.

Maybe a king, who was known for very little else but diplomacy, gets to be a war hero instead. Maybe Mohandas Gandhi gets to fight grizzlies. Maybe a pope hunted vampires in his spare time.

Compare Historical Hero Upgrade, Historical Villain Upgrade. Kung Fu Jesus is a subtrope. See also Beethoven Was an Alien Spy for a possible justification of this trope, and Memetic Badass.

Examples of Historical Badass Upgrade include:

Anime and Manga

• Escaflowne: Sir Isaac Newton is an alchemist who uses the power of Atlantis.
• Everyone in The Legend of Koizumi. Except Taizo.

Film

• UHF's "Gandhi II".
• William Wallace in Braveheart (possibly).
• Leonardo da Vinci (post mortem), Buckingham and Cardinal Richelieu in the 2011 film adaptation of The Three Musketeers.
• Qin Shi-Huangdi in Hero, as befitting a character in the wuxia genre.
• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Literature

• Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. That is all.
• Belisarius Series. You would think the Real Life Belisarius was badass enough, but this Belisarius defeats an evil cyborg Conqueror From the Future.

Live Action TV

• Used in-universe in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Living Witness". The story focuses on the historical depiction of an encounter with the Voyager crew by an ancient civilization hundreds of years before. The biased depiction portrays them as a ruthlessly violent gang of thugs, and the Voyager as an inpenetrable warship armed to the teeth with weapons, and containing a complement of Borg drones at the captain's disposal.

• The Infernoble Knight series in Yu-Gi-Oh! are fantasy versions of historic figures who seem to have powers over the element of Fire, including Charlemagne and Roland.

Video Games

• Most of the cast from Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors and Sengoku Basara. Granted, some of those ancient warriors were actually pretty Badass on their own...

Web Original

• Cracked.com and Theodore Roosevelt. Who was a legitimate badass in real life, but Cracked takes it to new levels.
  • Arguably, Mad Scientist Nikola Tesla as well.
• Irregular Webcomic: Sir Isaac Newton is portrayed as a Time Lord, and gathers various scientists from history to fix the time stream.
• The clone of Ben Franklin from Dr McNinja.

Western Animation

• Robot Chicken does this frequently:
  • A quick sketch has Benjamin Franklin practicing his bojutsu in a forest before triumphantly proclaiming, "For America!"
  • A Dream Sequence of George W. Bush involved him in a lightsaber duel against Abraham Lincoln.
  • One sketch consisted of a Tag Team match (in the vein of WWE, no less) with Ben Franklin and (in Big Damn Heroes fashion) Gandhi vs. the Wright Brothers.
  • Another was a parody of Three Hundred called 1776. It was a very loose retelling of the story of the Declaration of Independence.